The X factor: Innovator leading charge in genetic competition

Friday

Marc Hodosh, 34, is the new executive director of the Archon X PRIZE, a contest challenging scientists and engineers to map 100 human genomes in 10 days, at a cost of $10,000 apiece.

As a student at Boston University, Marc Hodosh watched his friends lug laundry in awkward heavy, baskets and saw an opportunity. The budding inventor developed a customized laundry backpack, completely with pockets for detergent, and sold it through Bed, Bath & Beyond and QVC.

A decade later, the Brookline resident is pushing for an innovation of another kind: a better way to map the human genome. Hodosh, 34, is the executive director of the Archon X PRIZE, a contest challenging scientists and engineers to map 100 human genomes in 10 days, at a cost of $10,000 apiece.

A $10 million purse awaits the team who gets the process right. But that’s no easy money: The first team to map a human genome in 2000 spent $100 million and nine months — for a single genome.

“What we’re doing has literally never been done by anyone,” Hodosh said. “The best technology today is at least $1 million and many months.”

The first X PRIZE was launched in 1996 and challenged inventors to create a spacecraft able to launch three humans 100 kilometers above the earth twice in two weeks. The contest made international headlines in 2004 when inventor Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen won the $10 million purse.

The genome X PRIZE was launched last year. So far, four teams have been announced, but Hodosh hints there are still “a number in the pipeline.”

Despite the challenge facing the X PRIZE teams, Hodosh believes he will be able to award the prize in three to five years.

“This will be a historic moment when it’s accomplished,” he said.

As executive director, Hodosh is in responsible for recruiting teams, managing ethical and legal issues and raising money to operate the X Prize Foundation. But his most important job, he said, is creating buzz around the competition.

“If you have runners running around a track and nobody is cheering, they don’t run that fast,” he said.

Supporters of genomics believe the ability to quickly and easily map a human genome could usher in an era of personalized medicine, allowing doctors to identify and even treat genetic conditions at birth. Hodosh envisions a day when genome mapping would be as routine as a blood draw.

Hodosh, 34, was working as the chairman of the Boston FIRST Robotics Competition when he was tapped to lead the California-based X PRIZE last March.

“There was a lot of pressure to move to California,” the Beacon Street resident said, “but I thought this was the right place to be, and the right thing for the prize.”

Hodosh knows firsthand Boston’s penchant for innovation and biotechnology, having hobnobbed with many of the area’s high-profile innovators. But Hodosh said the entrepreneur in him was sparked back in medical school with the laundry backpack, then with the high-end beach cooler that followed it.

“I’d never taken a business course in my life, so this was like my business education,” Hodosh said, recalling his early inventions. “But my passion was technology.”

After selling his cooler business, Hodosh took some time off to consider his next step. He became interested in facial-recognition software and eventually created ID One Inc., which helped improve the technology’s accuracy. He later served as a consultant to Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway Personal Transporter.

“Marc is probably the most authentic young entrepreneur I have known,” said Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple computers who worked with Hodosh at ID One. “His deepest inner passion is to be involved with the creation of new and useful technologies and artifacts.”

In his free time, Hodosh launched the Boston chapter of the FIRST Robotics Competition, an annual event that challenges high schoolers to solve specific problems with their own robotic inventions. Kamen and Wozniak are both involved in the competition.

Hodosh said he plans to stay at the helm of Boston FIRST while running the X PRIZE.

“If you can envision the energy of the NFL and the sound of a rock concert, that’s what hits you in the face,” Hodosh said, recalling the annual competition.

Hodosh said he’ll work with the X PRIZE Foundation until the genome challenge is met, whenever that happens. But as much enthusiasm as he has for his new job, the life-long inventor admits the idea of competing for the prize, rather than awarding it, has its appeal.

“I don’t think I could solve this particular challenge,” he said, “but the excitement of inventing something — yeah, I feel that.”

Neal Simpson of The Brookline (Mass.) TAB can be reached at nsimpson@cnc.com.

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